Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia
Page 15
In addition, Geraldine Belmear stated in an interview that the president of West Virginia State College, John W. Davis, was opposed to dancing on campus (Belmear 2000). But judging by reports in the student newspaper, the Yellow Jacket, dances did take place there, although the music performed was in a sweet style. On December 7, 1935, the Ivy Leaf Club, the pledge class of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and the Scrollers, the counterpart for the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, held a Snow Fest for which “Elmer Anderson and his Rhythm Kings played sweet music for the lovely dancers” (YJ 12.21.35, 3).
It must be noted that, as varied as their styles may seem, the seventeen recordings made by Lunceford’s band around the time of the Fairmont engagement represent neither the manner in which those numbers were performed in live situations nor indeed all of the types of music performed by Lunceford’s band. Gleason’s recollection of half-hour-long versions of “For Dancers Only” stands in sharp contrast to the recording of June 15, 1937, which lasted just two minutes and thirty-six seconds. In his biography of Lunceford, Eddy Determeyer observed: “Apart from ‘For Dancers Only,’ selections such as ‘Dinah,’ ‘Strictly Instrumental,’ and ‘Wham’ could, according to the circumstances, be stretched into six- or sixty-minute orgies” (Determeyer 2006, 125). For recordings, arrangements had to be compressed in order to fit the time constraints of a ten-inch disc: entire sections of a number were omitted, and solos were truncated.
In addition to the dance music discussed above, black West Virginians, like the rest of Lunceford’s fans, would have been treated to other styles of music. These came to include arrangements of well-known compositions of art music, including works entitled “Chopin’s Prelude” and “Beethoven’s Pathetique,” the latter arranged in 1940 by Chappie Willett, the West Virginia State graduate who had led Edwards’ Collegians early in the 1930s (Determeyer 2006, 173–74). Reportedly, there were also charts created in imitation of the styles of other well-known bands of the period. With the exception of the members of the rhythm section, the musicians would, on at least one occasion during a performance, form into a glee club to sing one or more choral works for the audience.
In sum, the Lunceford band presented what was perhaps the most diverse program of music performed by any black dance band during the 1930s—and thereby became one of the most successful. Its tours were highly profitable, attracting hundreds, if not thousands, of dancers to large venues. No longer under Irving Mills’s control, the band played percentage dates, as did most black dance bands, and operated on the same commonwealth principle that distributed the proceeds of each engagement more or less equally among the musicians as did Gilmore’s Midnighters, King Oliver’s band, and numerous other black bands, though Lunceford apparently took a significantly larger chunk for himself. But unlike many other bands, Lunceford’s enjoyed tremendous popularity on the road and thus earned higher returns than had it been contracted to play an extended engagement in a nightclub or ballroom at union scale. As Ed Wilcox, pianist and arranger, explained it, “The real reason we did all those one-nighters was that the location jobs didn’t pay the same money. It suited Jimmie to do one-nighters because he could make twice as much money that way” (Dance 1973, 117).
There are several reasons why so much attention has been given to Lunceford’s debut engagement in Fairmont, West Virginia, in this study. One is that, thanks to Lunceford’s numerous recordings around the time of that gig, it is possible to consider specific pieces and the styles associated with them. This permits us to connect audience tastes with those styles and understand the preferences of fans, including those residing in north-central West Virginia and vicinity, for different types of music.
In tandem with its recordings, we also know that Lunceford was known to audiences outside of New York by virtue of broadcasts from the Cotton Club during the early months of 1934. The articles in the West Virginian announcing the band’s impending visit identified it as “Jimmy [sic] and His New York Cotton Club Orchestra,” even though it had not played there since terminating its contract with Irving Mills. The Cotton Club had become an icon of urban sophistication, the venue where Duke Ellington rose to fame to be followed by Cab Calloway. Association with that establishment added to Lunceford’s reputation. Thus recordings and radio worked in tandem to create an audience throughout much of the country for his band well before it arrived to perform. To be sure, Lunceford was by no means the only one to benefit from the synergistic effect of these two media. As Benny Goodman would later in the decade, Lunceford, in the words of Jeffrey Magee, “systematically exploited the interdependence of what can be called the three R’s: Road, Radio, and Records” (Magee 2005, 7).
The first of those “R’s” offers a final justification for the close attention to the Lunceford band, its music, and its debut in Fairmont. The road would lead Lunceford back to the Mountain State eighteen times before World War II severely curtailed, where it did not end altogether, touring by bus for most bands, black or white. The number of his visits far exceeded those of other black bands in the same period. Only Oliver’s band came close with a total of fifteen engagements, but of those, fourteen occurred within the six-month period between September 1934 and February 1935. Between 1934 and 1942, with the exception of 1935 and 1938, the Lunceford band played multiple engagements in the Mountain State, usually in the kind of close succession by which the Sissle band had fulfilled three engagements as discussed earlier.
It is for all of these reasons that Sissle’s and Lunceford’s engagements in West Virginia in 1934 show the way to the future of big band jazz in black West Virginia. They proved that there was a large audience in the Mountain State for their music—one that could be served profitably by multiple engagements in close succession, that knew their music in advance primarily thanks to radio, and that was prepared to travel great distances for the chance to dance to their music and to that of other leading black bands of the 1930s. A taste for big band jazz was well-established among African American West Virginians by the middle of the decade. At the same time, the New York–based music industry was equally aware of the potential audience in the Mountain State. While local and territory bands would continue to maintain a presence, between 1935 and the start of World War II, black name bands from the Big Apple would soon dominate the scene.
PART THREE
West Virginia in the Swing Era: 1935–1942
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Place of the Mountain State on the Road Traveled by the Big Bands
Conventional wisdom, first expressed in 1956 by Marshall W. Stearns, holds that the Swing Era began on August 21, 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles (Stearns 1956, 211). On that night, following a decidedly lackluster tour that originated in New York, the Benny Goodman Orchestra appeared suddenly to find its audience for big band jazz. When the band played Fletcher Henderson’s arrangement of “King Porter Stomp,” half the crowd apparently stopped dancing to listen to the band and was vociferous in expressing its enthusiasm for this number. Goodman later recalled: “That first big roar from the crowd was one of the sweetest sounds I ever heard in my life” (Goodman and Kolodon 1939; 1961, 198–99).
Viewed through the lens of the activities of black dance bands in 1934 in West Virginia, it could be argued that the Swing Era began at least eighteen months before Goodman’s engagement at the Palomar Ballroom. A close reading of the Pittsburgh Courier as well as eleven newspapers published in the Mountain State reveals evidence of a total of forty dances that took place between February and December 1934.1
A variety of bands provided the music for those engagements. King Oliver’s Orchestra played fifteen during its stay in Huntington. As noted earlier, Jimmie Lunceford provided music one in Fairmont, and Noble Sissle played four in as many communities as did the Sunset Royal Serenaders. Walter Barnes and Speed Webb’s bands played three each, while Cecil Scott performed twice and Don Redman and Cab Calloway performed once each. The remaining six documented dances were played by local dance orch
estras.
The large number of dances in 1934 may well have reflected the audience’s collective sense of its own economic good times as production and employment picked up in the coalfields. The next year only twenty-eight dances were held, as was the case in 1936; but there was a pronounced shift in the place of origin of many of the touring bands that came to West Virginia in those years and during the rest of the period leading up to World War II.
Unlike the period leading up to 1935, when the Mountain State appeared to be a meeting point for bands from the Northeast, Southeast, and Midwest, New York City would become the primary source of talent. And, as will be discussed in this chapter, the close professional relationship between two men—Joe Glaser and George Morton—would constitute the principal force shaping the culture of big band jazz and dance music in West Virginia. Morton resided in Beckley and worked as Glaser’s regional manager for the southern coalfields. The record of their collaboration as well as other evidence provides an opportunity to examine what is usually treated only marginally in discussions of the Swing Era: the characteristics of small-town and rural audiences for this music during the 1930s and early 1940s.
For the big bands of the 1930s, success was defined by prominence in three areas of activity. The first consisted of extended engagements in venues in New York and other major cities from which one could broadcast regularly, so as to build a following beyond the immediate audience. Prominence was also achieved by making recordings to be distributed as widely as possible in order to maintain that larger audience’s interest. The third was to travel as frequently and as extensively as possible to play for what had become at least a large regional audience, if not one that was national in scope. Its members included those who had listened to the broadcasts, purchased the recordings, and knew what to expect when the band came to town. As noted in the previous chapter, these three activities made up, as Jeffrey Magee put it, “the three R’s” of the big band business: radio, recording, and the road (Magee 2005, 206).
The vast majority of studies of big band jazz, not surprisingly, focus on the bands themselves, their leading musicians, and the recorded repertory that documents their artistic achievement and defines their historical significance. That they broadcast over the radio is of secondary importance unless such programs played a decisive role in creating their reputations. Obvious examples of such programming include Benny Goodman’s Let’s Dance and Camel Caravan broadcasts between 1935 and 1939 that, when combined with recordings and tours (including the one that climaxed in Los Angeles in the summer of 1935), established the clarinetist as the “King of Swing” and put his music into every American home in which residents had both a radio and an interest in dance music (Magee 2005, 224–30).
Of the three domains of big band activity, the road is the most difficult to document. That it was essential to a band’s fortunes is undeniable, but, barring discussion of an untoward event, consideration of its character has usually been largely limited to musicians’ anecdotes about one tour or another. A more discerning view is missing. Often one reads recollections about touring “the South,” “the Midwest,” or another region and encounters imprecise, broadly drawn memories of a player’s experiences in those territories. A case in point is a story told by bass player Arvell Shaw concerning the discovery of the growing popularity of what would turn out to be a hit recording in the early 1960s for Louis Armstrong and his All Stars preserved in the documentary film Satchmo. “We were somewhere way out in Ioway [sic], and people kept calling out ‘Hello Dolly,’ ‘Hello Dolly’ . . .” (Satchmo videorecording 1989). His facial expression and gestures as he told this story strongly suggested that, as far as Shaw was concerned, if “Ioway” was not the end of the earth, one could see it from there.
In view of the evidence in hand, I believe that West Virginia is in many respects an exemplar of “the road,” not the sketchy and vague outline that Shaw and other players’ memories convey but a comparatively detailed image that includes the work of local promoters, the locations and types of venues, the size, nature, and musical tastes of audiences, and repertories played by the bands that entertained them. Both the artistic and the business sides of the name bands’ experience on this particular stretch of the road shed light on the larger subject of the culture of big band jazz and dance music beyond New York and its suburbs.
There can be little doubt that, while big band dance music was new at the start of the Depression, tours of the coalfields by entertainers from elsewhere in the country were not: the evidence of regular visits by tent shows and circuses in the first three decades of the last century makes that clear. As previously noted, because those companies probably discovered the most likely locations for a large audience, the best routes to connect these, and the best means of promoting their performances, by the 1930s such logistical challenges had been largely addressed. Indeed, some of them were further eased as ongoing highway construction facilitated faster and safer travel between engagements.
By the mid-1930s the challenge was how to ensure profitable dances in places close enough together to make a trip through the central Appalachians worth the effort, as opposed to fulfilling a single engagement in West Virginia before heading back to the flatlands, as had been done at the beginning the of the decade. That required people on the ground, so to speak, who knew their own territories and the preferences of a potential audience, who had connections that would ensure adequate publicity, and who had access to venues of sufficient size to accommodate a crowd large enough to guarantee a sufficient return both for the bands (their New York–based managers, in truth) and for the local entrepreneurs themselves.
That an extensive network of such connections existed in the Mountain State as of 1935 (and probably earlier as well) is documented by coverage in the Pittsburgh Courier of a series of engagements by Earl Hines in April and Cab Calloway in June of that year. They resulted from the initiative of a man who would prove to be the most important intermediary between the black name bands and fans of dancing in the southern coalfields from the spring of 1935 until early 1940.
George Edward Morton: Black West Virginia’s Preeminent Booking Agent, 1935–1940
More than any other individual, George Edward Morton (see Fig. 7.1) appears to have exerted the greatest influence on the growth of African Americans’ interest in big band jazz in West Virginia in the period from April 9, 1935, until his untimely death on February 6, 1940. Born in Fairmont in 1909, Morton was the son of Edward L. Morton, an educator and prominent businessman in Beckley’s black community whose biography was summarized earlier. Upon completing high school, George Morton attended West Virginia State College, graduating in 1935. He suffered from poor health and found that booking bands was something that his limited physical resources could handle. Even prior to graduation, he booked his first band for a dance at the armory in Beckley, that of Earl “Fatha” Hines (Flippen 2005; PC 3.30.35, 2/9). Much about this engagement anticipates his later work.
Perhaps the principal reason so much can be documented about Morton’s activities is his family’s friendship with the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier’s entertainment pages, Chester Washington. “Chet” saw to it that word of Morton’s dances appeared regularly in the Courier, which was, as Morton’s younger sister, Francis Morton Flippen, later recalled, “more or less the paper for the people of color” in the Mountain State (Flippen 2005).
Hines’s band appeared in Beckley on April 9, 1935, for a dance celebrating what was termed “Emancipation Day,” in actuality the seventieth anniversary of the day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in 1865. The dance was described in the Courier as Morton’s “maiden debut in the entertainment field” (PC 3.30.35, 2/9). Hines had already appeared in Logan on April 2, in Welch on April 3—where his band reportedly attracted “one of the largest crowds ever seen ... at a dance,” according to Clarence Lilly, reporter of “Local Colored News” for the Welch Daily News (WDN 4.4.35, 7)—and in Charleston on April 4. After playing
in Beckley, it headed north to perform for another record crowd at the armory in Fairmont on April 10, and while doing so broadcast over local radio station WMMN for half an hour, according to James A. West, who had booked the band for that engagement and who filed a story on it for the Courier (PC 4.27.35, 2/1). Departing Fairmont, Hines headed to Pittsburgh to play the Savoy Ballroom on the 12th. Apart from the Beckley and Fairmont gigs, the dances had been booked by a consortium calling itself the Amusement Kings, “a new powerful organization operating in the mountain state” (PC 3.30.35, 2/9).
Fig. 7.1. George E. Morton, ca. 1938. (J. Bryan Flippen)
In June, Cab Calloway’s band toured the southern part of the state, playing for a series of benefit dances presented under the auspices of various posts of the black American Legion to raise money for the Legion and for a scholarship fund. The Courier’s coverage of these engagements explains Morton’s relationship to the Amusement Kings or, as they were then identified, “the Kings of Amusement,” and also describes the network of associations that Morton would continue to use to build audiences for dances. I suspect that this reportage may also suggest how the traveling tent shows organized engagements prior to the 1930s. It seems logical that they had probably developed similar networks of local entrepreneurs to assure profitable tours.
Table 7.1. George Morton’s booking network in West Virginia, 1935–1940
Note
1. The satellite communities for Bluefield and Welch are identical because they are located between these two cities on U.S. Route 52, making the respective sites of dances equally accessible to their residents.
In stories concerning the Calloway engagements, Morton is described as one of the “Kings.” Three men in Charleston were also part of this consortium: Leroy “Tex” Fonteneau, C. W. Hart, and Dr. T. L. Mitchell. Fonteneau’s name crops up repeatedly in newspaper reports in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a nightclub operator and occasional booker of touring bands for dances in Charleston. Of the others, the newspaper record says nothing. There were also “Kings” in Bluefield (Dr. J. Ernest Martin) and in Welch (J. A. Shelton). Unknown is whether James A. West, Samuel Carpenter, or others known to book bands in Fairmont were ever members of this group, or whether Morton worked with them simply on an ad hoc basis when he was notified of an open date on a band’s tour that might be profitably filled by an engagement in the northern coalfield.